Oskar Fried

In 1899, Fried married the amateur poet Augusta (Gusti) Rathgeber (1872–1926) and had two daughters with her, Monika and Emerentia (dates are unknown).

From 1892, Gusti Rathgeber had been married to German poet Otto Julius Bierbaum but left him when she and Fried met, and fell in love with each other.

Born in Berlin, the son of a Jewish shopkeeper, he worked as a clown, a stable boy and a dog trainer before studying composition with Iwan Knorr (1891–92, Hoch'sche Conservatory) and Engelbert Humperdinck (as private student) in Frankfurt.

[3] On 4 February 1913 Fried conducted the German premiere with the Berlin Philharmonic of Mahler's Ninth Symphony, the second performance of the work.

Between 24 September and 18 October 1920 he gave the first (almost complete) Mahler cycle in Vienna, conducting all the symphonies (except the 8th which he apparently never performed), incl.

Das Lied von der Erde, Kindertotenlieder, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, and some Wunderhorn songs.

In 1922, he went to the USSR as the first foreign conductor invited to perform after the Russian Revolution, and was greeted by Lenin on the station platform.

The performance has later been praised as "remarkably successful"[4] and a "highly adventurous undertaking for an acoustic recording" which required "careful planning and experimentation".

[6] In November 1927, at the invitation of the BBC programme planner and his own former student Edward Clark, he made his British conducting debut, in a program of Delius, Weber, Brahms and Liszt in London.

[7] Driven from Germany by the anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime in 1933, he emigrated to the Georgian city of Tbilisi in the Soviet Union.

15 for male chorus and orchestra (J. Hainauer, Breslau) Works without opus numbers and unpublished • Four orchestral songs (performed 1912).